10 SEO Analysis Tools You Should Be Using

A few months ago, I presented a massive list of free SEO tools that can help you accomplish various SEO tasks (e.g., backlink investigation, keyword research, etc.). I received a lot of positive feedback about that list, but people consistently requested more SEO analysis tools.

Since I’m a man of the people, this post is completely dedicated to SEO analysis tools. For each tool, I’ve provided a brief overview of its functionality, and I’ve also included helpful screenshots and videos along the way. After you finish this post, your SEO analysis toolbox should be overflowing with goodness!

WooRank is a freemium tool that provides an “instant website review.” Without a premium account, you are only allowed to generate 1 free report per week, but you are able to view previously generated reports. Also, the tool currently offers a 7-day unlimited free trial, which gives you access to unlimited reviews. If you’re interested in purchasing a plan, the cheapest one is currently $49/month.

Here’s the summary view from a WooRank report:

The report is divided into the following 12 sections:

Top 5 Priorities – These are the most important action items for your site.

HubSpot recently replaced its wildly popular Website Grader with Marketing Grader. Unlike many of the other SEO analysis tools on this list, which focus primarily on your site’s SEO activities, Marketing Grader digs deeper into your company’s online marketing strategy.

Here is an example of a Marketing Grader report:

The report focuses on three areas of your company’s online marketing efforts:

Top of the Funnel – Are you effectively bringing visitors to the website? This section investigates your blogging activities, your site’s SEO, your site’s mobile friendliness, and your social media activities.

Middle of the Funnel – Are you effectively converting visitors into leads and leads into customers? This section analyzes the effectiveness of your landing pages, and it evaluates your site’s level of social engagement.

Analytics – Are you effectively monitoring your marketing activities? This section identifies whether or not you’re using analytics software, and it compares your site’s traffic to other HubSpot customers.

SiteTrail is a free “all-in-one website analysis tool,” and it does an excellent job aggregating information from various different data sources. After you run SiteTrail on a website, the tool presents a report that summarizes its findings.

Here’s an excerpt from a SiteTrail report:

The report summarizes 13 different analyses, which are as follows:

Social Media Analysis – This summarizes the site’s social engagement on 20 popular social media sites (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, reddit, Topsy, etc.).

SEO Analysis – This section lists how many of the site’s pages are indexed, the site’s number of backlinks, and the directories the site is listed in.

Visitor Analysis – The site’s number of visitors, visits, and pageviews are listed along with the visitors’ geographic distribution.

Traffic Analysis – This section lists the site’s traffic ranks, and it shows how the site’s traffic is trending.

Revenue Analysis – The site’s value is estimated based on its traffic and projected advertising revenue.

Content Analysis – This section shows the title, description, and popular keywords for the site’s homepage.

Traffic Travis is a desktop application that offers a suite of free SEO tools, and one of them focuses on analyzing your site’s on-page SEO. Using this analysis tool, you can identify important information about your site’s pages, including PageRank, number of backlinks, and various optimizations for important page elements (e.g., titles, descriptions, headings, images, etc.).

Here is a very helpful video that gives you a quick overview of the tool’s on-page SEO functionality:

This SEO analysis tool has been around for quite some time, and although it’s not the prettiest tool on the list, it’s still incredibly useful. After you evaluate a URL, the tool presents an analysis report, which is broken down into the following sections:

HTTP Headers Check – This section displays the HTTP headers that are returned in response to a request for the given URL.

Head Elements – The page’s most important <head> tags (e.g., title, meta description, etc.) are displayed along with helpful advice and corresponding videos.

Page Most Relevant Keywords / Keyphrases – This section presents the page’s most popular (based on keyword density) one, two, three, and four word keyword phrases.

The Page Displayed within Search Engine Results – This is an approximation of what the page will look like in the search engine results.

URLs Found in the Page – All of the page’s internal and external outlinks are displayed.

Keywords Found in the Anchor Tags – This section shows the anchor text used in each of the page’s outlinks.

Keywords Found in Image Alt Attributes – This is a list of the phrases used in alt text for the page’s images.

Heading & Phrase Elements – Each of the page’s heading and stylistic tags are shown.

Lipperhey is not as popular as some of the other SEO analysis tools, but it presents a wealth of information. After you perform an analysis, the tool presents a summary view, which includes a cumulative score as well as technical, SEO, and popularity scores.

Here is an example of the tool’s SEO summary:

The tool also presents an in-depth view for each of the summarized sections:

SpyderMate is a premium service (the Pro plan is currently $49/month) that offers a number of useful SEO analysis tools. Fortunately, they also offer a 30-day free trial to allow you to experiment with the tools.

SpyderMate’s two most useful analysis tools are the Scorecard and the Auditor. Here is a Scorecard example:

As the example shows, the Scorecard displays 8 interesting metrics about a given domain:

Domain Authority – This is the same as SEOmoz’s Domain Authority score.

Unique Domain Backlinks – This number is obtained from Majestic SEO.

Google US Traffic Value – This is the estimated monthly cost of purchasing the same number of visitors from Google.

Google US Keywords – This is how many of the domain’s keyword phrases are ranking in the top 20 results of Google (based on the 40 million keyword phrases currently tracked by SEMRush).

Facebook Shares – This is the number of times the domain’s homepage has been shared on Facebook.

Twitter Shares – This is the number of times the domain’s homepage has been tweeted on Twitter.

Google+ Shares – This is the number of times the domain’s homepage has been +1ed on Google+.

Domain Age – This is how long the domain has been registered.

All of this information is also displayed in a radar chart, which compares the site’s values against median values for each corresponding metric.

In addition to the Scorecard, SpyderMate also offers an Auditor tool that reports on a site’s adherence to 25 best practices. Here’s an excerpt from an Auditor report:

DIYSEO offers a free website grader that analyzes a site and presents its findings in an SEO report card. This report card displays a letter grade, which is generated based on the site’s adherence to best practices in the following 6 categories:

Current Rank – This category identifies whether or not the site is ranking in Google and Bing for the targeted keyword.

Link Building – This section checks if the site is receiving a sufficient number of backlinks.

On-site – This simply checks if the targeted keyword is being used in the homepage’s title and body.

Accessibility – This category ensures that the site’s homepage loads quickly and is accessible to search engines.

Trust Metrics – This section checks if the site is reasonably well established.

Current Indexing – This simply checks if the site is being indexed in Google, Bing, and Yahoo!.

Seoptimer is a free SEO analysis tool that investigates a given URL’s on-page SEO ranking factors. After you analyze a URL, the tool presents a summary of the most important action items. Then, it displays its analysis results, which are broken down into the following 7 categories:

Our free SEO analysis tool provides a small subset of the information we provide in our full-blown SEO audit. The tool investigates a URL’s adherence to 20 important on-page SEO best practices, and then, it presents the results in a report, which is divided into 5 categories:

It’s Your Turn!

I would love to hear from you in the comments. Which of these tools is your favorite? What other SEO analysis tools should everyone be using?

About The Author

Steve Webb is an SEO audit specialist at Web Gnomes. He received his Ph.D. from Georgia Tech, where he published dozens of articles on Internet-related topics. Professionally, Steve has worked for Google and various other Internet startups, and he's passionate about sharing his knowledge and experiences with others. You can find him on Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn.

Comments

NIce list. I’ve used about half of those. Woorank is pretty quality for what you can get for free. I would say though that a good SEO brain is always the basis for any analysis. I mean, tools are great, but you need a sharp brain to make it all work. Plus machines will always miss nuances that a good SEO will catch.

Thanks for the comment Scott! I agree that a good SEO brain is the most important component for any analysis, but tools definitely help minimize the tedious work so you can focus your brain power on the most difficult tasks

By the way, if you look for a powerful crawler, then you should use screamingfrog.co.uk /seo spider/. The basic version is free and can tell you a lot about the onpage factors of your site. I hope it helps you.

This is probably blasphemy so I’m going to whisper… I don’t use any paid tools.

I spend most of my time doing SEO audits, and my entire workflow uses custom tools that I’ve written myself (or free tools).

In the past, I’ve used the paid versions of the top backlink tools (e.g., Majestic, Ahrefs, OSE, etc.), but I was doing so much analysis work on my own that it stopped making sense to pay for a lot of the functionality I already had in-house.

With that said, I’m probably going to re-evaluate a lot of paid tools in the coming months so I’ll definitely let you know if I go back to any of them (or incorporate new ones into my workflow).

Hey Steve,
This is a nice list, indeed. My current employer sent me to your website. I am doing SEO work for him right now and am having a not so easy time getting his employers company at the top of all Google pages. So, I am hoping one of these 10 SEO help sites will work for me.

Great share steve, your list help me a lot. I found some new tools for optimizing site and solve lots of problem. Woo rank is one of my favorite and also helpful. I have receive so many different suggestions and errors by using some of tools from your list.
Thanks a lot

Great article, I have tried most of those tools, Since Raven Tools and AHREFS lost their Google Keywords API ive been on the lookout for more tools that I can use and that are affordable for a freelance SEO like myself.

Unfortunately, I don’t know of any tools that are focused on SEO analysis for South Africa. However, most of these tools should be country-agnostic, assuming the site’s language can be tokenized based on whitespace.

If the tools on this list don’t work for you, let me know on Twitter (@SteveWebb), and I’ll try to point you in the right direction

I was really sad when Woorank decided to start charging for their services. The one report a week sometimes is not enough, but I can understand them wanting to turn a profit. Out of all the tools I have used it is still the best in my opinion.

Great little list, I have used SEOmoz for their on-page report but found it was quite expensive for something I got very little use out of. Woorank looks perfect but again its quite a lot to pay every month when you just want the on-site reports.

Going to look into Traffic Travis though so will see how that holds up

Hey Steve,
These tools are great! And… you’ve got a huge list of them too. The only thing that’s throwing me off is when I hit tab to switch comment fields (i.e. name, mail, etc), it jumps me to your “subscribe” field and I have to scroll ALL the way down again LOL. Anyways, it was worth me stopping by!
Thanks again!
-Jeroen

Thanks for the comment, Leon. You can do a lot with 1 free analysis report Once you’ve established a baseline (and identified a site’s weaknesses) with the initial report, you’ll have all the information necessary to take things to the next level.

Especially I like how you mixed up well known tools everyone knows about (at least to me it seems everyone have checked HubSpot) and less obvious solutions, like SpyderMate (gonna have a closer look at it).

As for my take, I’d like to point to WebSite Auditor website analysis tool. It could be on this list too, since there is a free version available (I’m using the paid one though).

WebSite Auditor scans pages for code errors, duplicate content and other structure-related issues they may have. Other than that, there is this on-page optimization module, which allows determining the ideal keyword placement and researches page elements that can be optimized. In WebSite Auditor you can also analyze competitor’s pages to compare of to improve own on-page strategy. There are actually more features, I just won’t be listing all of them here. But this is the best solution with regard to on-page optimization I found so far.

Thanks for that very thoughtful comment. When I originally put this list of SEO analysis tools together, WebSite Auditor was on it. I don’t remember why it didn’t make the cut, but your comment fixes that oversight

By the way, you could have included WebSite Auditor or Screaming Frog, without them the list doesn’t look complete somehow.

However, I haven’t tried most of the tools so far, just played around with Woorank for a while, but 1 report per month wasn’t enough for me. Gonna have a closer look at some other solutions mentioned here.

I like two from this list i tested them all but these two were my favorite SEOpTimer and woorank mostly because they displayed results right away without trying to sell you something. I tested http://www.tjg-designs.com splash page and the results were right on.
Thank you for the list it was fun testing each of these.